Louvre shutters and doors, generally comprising a rectangular frame, with horizontal louvre slats, extending from side to side are well known. Typically, such louvre slats are simply pivoted at each end in the frame. They are moved together in unison by means of a rod, fastened to each slat by a movable coupling. When the rod is moved all the slats moving in unison.
Numerous designs of such doors are available in wood. However, in order to provide a longer life and a better resistance to weathering, it is preferable to manufacturer the doors and shutters out of thermo-plastic material. Many such plastic louvre door designs are now available, using hollow extrusions for the frames and extrusions for slats. However, the construction of such plastic louvre doors has generally speaking, followed the design of wooden louvre doors. In such plastic louvre doors the slats were simply pivoted between the side frames of the door. A central control rod was movably linked to each of the slats at their edges, and the slats simply pivoted to and fro in this way. The construction and design of the frames and the way which they were secured together were relatively crude and the attachment of hinges to such doors was somewhat fragile.
In particular, however, the design of the frames and slats and the single control rod were such that the slats were obliged to be located at a fixed predetermined spacing along the side frames. It is, however, well-known that such doors must be cut to fit the particular size of door or window in the house, so that the dimensions of the frame will vary somewhat from top to bottom, from one house to another. The variation in frame height, in the prior plastic doors, was achieved simply by cutting off a portion of the top or bottom frames of the door. This practice would remove one of the edges of the extrusion from which the top and bottom frames were made. This would then have to be replaced by cap strips. The end result would produce a somewhat weaker frame. In some cases only one end of a frame would be cut, so the end frames would be for example wider at the bottom and narrower on the top.
For all these reasons, it is desirable to provide an improved form of louvre shutter or door, in which the slats are linked together in such a way that they may be located with varying spacings in varying sizes of doors.